My closing presentation to the Jersey Climate Conversation.
It was a huge honour recently to be asked to be a speaker at the Jersey’s Climate Conversation, the island’s Citizens’ Assembly. I was asked to be their final presenter before they went off to deliberate their decisions. I was asked to give them a boost and a sense of why their deliberations matter so much. Here is the presentation I gave them, firstly the video, and then the transcript. I hope you enjoy it.
“It is a huge honour to have been asked to be your final presenter. I imagine you have already seen so many presenters that I’m quite the last thing you want to see. I hope there might just be room for one more.. . The first thing I want to say is thank you. You have had quite a time of it. Bombarded with complex information, immersed in concepts and science that may well have led to you having sleepless nights.
My own experience, when I really ‘got’ climate change, was like what the great mystics back through history have called a ‘Dark Night of the Soul’. This is an area of knowledge that can bring with it a burden, of despair, hopelessness, grief. I have huge respect to you all for taking up this challenge, on behalf of your fellow citizens, and bringing your best selves to figuring this stuff out.
I’m not here to tell you whether your target ought to be 2030, 2040, 2050. That’s not for me to say. I have only visited Jersey once, gave a talk about the urgent imperative to move away from oil and gas dependency, and was then talked about in the letters page of the island’s newspaper for weeks as if I were the most idealistic and dangerous person to ever set foot on the island…
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